Global communication: These are the “good old days”

I’ve touched on this before, but I was reminded this morning, when chatting and exchanging cat photos with our daughter, of how grateful I am to live in the age we do.

You see, she lives in Ireland.

We often see FB posts about how everything was so much better back in the “old days” – whenever the heck that was.

There are a lot of things about the “old days” that can be appealing, I admit, but I wouldn’t trade our ability to communicate the way we do in this day and age for anything.

When I first moved out of the family home in Winnipeg in late 1978, there were two ways to communicate: writing letters and making ridiculously expensive long-distance calls. These days, even though my daughter is 4,200 km away, we can communicate any way we want and it’s like she’s in the next room.

That was pure science fiction in the “good old days” but it’s now a reality that we take for granted, especially those too young to remember such things as letter writing or prohibitively expensive long-distance calls.

Or waiting to develop photos of your cats.

There are lots of reasons for existential angst these days (especially if you live in Canada or Ukraine) but our ability to communicate with each other, even over vast distances, isn’t one of them.

For someone in the future, today may well be the “good old days”. We should live them as if they were.